Ecological ethics and the human soul: Aquinas' substantial bifurcation, Whitehead's aesthetic unification (Saint Thomas Aquinas, Alfred North Whitehead)

In this dissertation, I argue that Thomas Aquinas so separates human beings from the rest of material creation that non-rational creatures can only be instrumental to the human good. This bifurcation is justified, on his account, by his understanding of the immaterial, subsistent nature of the human soul. I demonstrate that this anthropology is philosophically untenable because Aquinas' demonstration for the existence of the immaterial soul moves from the representative immateriality of universals to the ontological immateriality of the soul without any suitable middle term. This is akin to claiming that because I am thinking of the coldness of the North Pole, my thought itself is cold. Once this anthropology is shown to be untenable, then Aquinas' justification for instrumentalizing non-human material creation falls away. The way is then opened for considering an alternative metaphysics that finds any bifurcation between human beings and the rest of creation untenable.; Drawing on the work of Alfred North Whitehead, I argue that metaphysically ultimate units of reality, final real things, are all alike subjects of experience. This must be the case if we are to avoid making human beings exempt from the metaphysical categories that apply to other things, if we are to avoid metaphysical dualism. If all ultimate ontological units of existence are subjects, where this means that all such units of existence unify the diverse aspects of their immediate past into one felt experience, then all are self-creative to some degree. And since the good is identified as creativity, or the unifying of diversity, or the pursuit of beauty (and since this understanding of goodness is metaphysical, and so without extra-linguistic alternative) then all creatures are intrinsically good and have moral worth. I close the dissertation by demonstrating that this way of understanding the value of created things is superior to, and avoids the problems that plague, two of the current leading theories of the intrinsic value of created things, those of Holmes Rolston and J. Baird Callicott.